prayer

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

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Luke 18:9-14

I’ve preached this passage focusing on grace, and that’s a legitimate approach, especially given that this is the text for Reformation Sunday (which, as far as I can tell, few people observe these days). That sermon explained the tax collector is “justified” because he recognizes his sins and can accept God’s grace and forgiveness, which he has done nothing to earn. The Pharisee, on the other hand, believes he has earned his own justification, his own worthiness, and so refuses God’s grace. He is like Jesus’ audience: those who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” (Luke 18:9).

Given our current zeitgeist, what I notice in the passage this time around is not merely that the Pharisee believes he is righteous. He probably is. Pharisees worked hard to do the right things and be the right kind of people. If we lived in ancient Judea, we would have wanted a Pharisee as a next-door neighbor. He’d probably keep his yard neat and pick up after his dog. The tax collector, on the other hand, really has behaved deplorably. He’s collaborated with Rome and enriched himself by exploiting his own people.

But it isn’t the difference between these two men that I notice this year. What I notice is, “but they regard others with contempt.”

We are surrounded by contempt. Contempt is more than disagreement; it’s disgust, rooted in the inability to see the image of God in the other person. Schopenhauer said contempt is belief in the “utter worthlessness of a fellow human being.” Contempt is looking at someone and thinking, “The world would be better without you in it.”

This parable contains a couple of traps. The first trap we might fall into is romanticizing the tax collector. In a recent article in the Christian Century, a young woman describes years of church youth camp during which she felt like a failure as a Christian. She writes, “At youth group and church camp, I learned to perform my own unworthiness. … A sneering voice in my head whispered that I wasn’t good enough for God because I’d never been bad.” She writes that without realizing it, self-abasement had become her religious practice, and it took years to recognize the harm this caused. This kind of “performative unworthiness” becomes just another way to try to earn God’s love, when that love is freely given. Jesus never said, “You must be a broken, miserable sinner to be my follower.” The tax collector is not supposed to be our role model.

The second trap we might stumble into is our own contempt. We might wonder: After all, isn’t the Pharisee deserving of contempt? He begins his prayer by thanking God, but his gratitude immediately devolves into contempt for others. Pretty soon he isn’t really thanking God at all; he’s thanking himself as he looks at the tax collector with disdain.

Clearly, Jesus intends us to understand that contempt isn’t good. It’s not hard to see why: Contempt is not loving our neighbors as ourselves. Contempt is not loving our enemies (Matthew 5:44). But if we make this parable about how terrible the Pharisees were, or even how terrible this one Pharisee is, we’ve missed the point – or fallen victim to it by being contemptuous ourselves. Anytime we draw a line between who’s “in” and who’s “out,” who is righteous and who is not, who is acceptable to God and who is not, this parable asserts you will find God on the other side.

Read this way, the parable is not about self-righteousness and humility any more than it is about a pious Pharisee and desperate tax collector. Rather, this parable is about God: God who alone can judge the human heart; God who determines to justify the ungodly.

In 2025, we live in a what Arthur C. Brooks calls a “culture of contempt.” Brooks writes, “Nothing is about honest disagreement; it is all about your interlocutor’s lack of basic human decency. Thus, no one with whom you disagree is worth engaging at all. The result is contempt.”

As the government shutdown drags on into Week 4, it’s obvious that this culture of contempt is a serious problem in a society and a system of government that require collaboration. Contempt is encouraged by some of our leaders, but it just doesn’t work in a democracy and we do not have to buy into it. We can fight for justice without resorting to contempt. We can be the change we wish to see in the world, and start by swearing off contempt. Trevin Wax writes, “Perhaps the test of faithfulness in a day of moral degradation will be our love for people across chasms of difference. Faithfulness isn’t in showy displays that we hate all the right people.”

And perhaps faithfulness isn’t in showing we’re right and the other person or group is stupid or morally bankrupt, but rather in working toward achieving a shared objective. What objective might we share with those with whom we disagree vehemently? We’d have to speak with each other, without contempt, to find that out.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
McKenzie Watson-Fore, “Dear Jesus, Am I Broken Enough Yet?” in The Christian Century, July 9, 2025, https://www.christiancentury.org/features/dear-jesus-am-i-broken-enough-yet.
Matt Skinner, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-30-3/commentary-on-luke-189-14-4
David Lose, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-30-3/commentary-on-luke-189-14-2
Arthur C. Brooks, Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt (New York: Broadside Books, 2019)
Trevin Wax, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/silent-sin-kills-love/

The Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge

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Luke 18:1–8

Luke tells us Jesus told this parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge, “In order that we might pray always and not lose heart.” The widow in the parable may be trying to claim her inheritance, or perhaps to recover property that her deceased husband’s family won’t give back to her. The judge, we’re told, “neither feared God nor had respect for people.” This woman may not have the means to bribe him; perhaps her opponent does. What she can do is pester. The NRSV translation of the passage says the judge doesn’t want the woman to wear him out, but the Greek verb literally means to beat until black and blue. The woman is harassing the judge until he feels like Mohammed Ali doing the rope-a-dope. Finally, the judge says to himself, “Even though I couldn’t care less about God and can’t stand people, I’ll give this woman what she wants, just to get her out of my hair.”

What on earth does this story tell us? Is it as simple as, “Even though the world may look broken, unjust, and corrupt, if we just keep praying, things will work out”? If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?

If we’re honest, we know that many of us, including the vulnerable, outcast, and oppressed, are already praying “always” for the coming of God’s justice. We pray and we pray and we pray some more that God will transform the hearts, institutions, and structures of our world so that they reflect God’s shalom, and yet here we are. The wolf does not live with the lamb. Nation continues to lift up sword against nation. So maybe this is not a story that tells us that if we just pray long enough and hard enough, we’ll get what we want.

Maybe this is a parable about the character of God. Here’s the contrast: on the one hand, the sleazy, compassionless judge; and on the other hand, God, whose desire for all of creation is shalom, a peace that is not mere lack of conflict, but rather wholeness, justice, reconciliation, healing. If this crooked judge will grant justice to those who seek it, how much more so will God. The God of shalom is with the widow. God takes sides; God is on the side of justice, and on the side of those who need justice, and we can trust that. And we can trust that God is drawing the world toward that vision of shalom, because that is who God is. Praying, then, is asking God to be God, the God of shalom.

In a world where the powers that would threaten shalom assert themselves so constantly and destructively, it is easy to lose heart. We need support from outside ourselves, and prayer calls on that power. When we pray, we experience faith; we become more engaged in our faith. Debie Thomas writes, “I can only speak from experience, but I know that when I persist in prayer – really persist, with a full heart, over a long period of time – something happens to me. My sense of who I am, to whom I belong, what really matters in this life, and why – these things mature and solidify. My heart grows stronger. It becomes less fragile and flighty. Once in a while, it even soars. And sometimes – here’s the surprise – these good things happen even when I don’t receive the answer I’m praying for.” In other words, prayer helps us not to “lose heart.”

According to an African proverb, “When you pray, use your feet.” Prayer is our resource for the power we need to use our feet – to act in partnership with God by doing what God needs us to do. Here, the widow serves as a role model for us. She wouldn’t have had to argue her case if there had been even a single male relative in her family willing to argue for her, so there must not have been one. She wasn’t intimidated by the reputation of the callous, corrupt judge. She broke social barriers and stood up to a system of oppression in her quest for justice. She broke the mold, and the result was a just verdict.

But there’s another angle, which is that maybe Jesus isn’t talking about what Anne Lamott calls our “beggy” prayers, our “Please, please, please, God” petitions. Maybe Jesus – and Luke – are talking about something else when Jesus says, “pray always.” Richard Rohr writes, “Prayer is indeed the way to make contact with God …, but it is not an attempt to change God’s mind about us or about events. Such attempts are what the secularists make fun of – and rightly so. It is primarily about changing our mind so that things like infinity, mystery, and forgiveness can resound within us. The small mind cannot see Great Things because the two are on two different frequencies or channels, as it were. The Big Mind can know big things, but we must change channels.” Maybe Jesus is telling us to change channels. I love that Rohr included forgiveness in his short list of things that are incredibly hard to grasp without holy help, that we need to “change channels” in order to do.

Why do we pray? Maybe we pray to stay connected to God. Maybe we pray to “change channels.” Maybe we pray in order to have the faith we need to keep on keeping on. Often, I think we pray simply because we must – because we have nowhere else to turn with our longings and hopes and fears that must be given voice. According to this parable, we pray so that we will not lose heart. In the end prayer is a mystery because we are in relationship with a mysterious God. But the passage gives us the simplest reason of all to pray: Jesus said, “Pray always.”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Richard Rohr, The Naked Now (New York: Crossroad, 2009).
Debie Thomas, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2016-09/october-16-29th-sunday-ordinary-time
William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, KY: Westminister/John Knox Press, 1994).
Shannon J. Kershner, https://fourthchurch.org/sermons/2016/101616.html.

Teach Us to Pray

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Luke 11:1-13

Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them to pray as John the Baptizer taught his disciples. Jesus accepts the challenge, and begins, “When you pray …” Not if you pray, but when. So, the first part of the lesson is that praying is what Jesus’ disciples do.

He then teaches them a model prayer, Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. Matthew’s version, imbedded in the Sermon on the Mount, is slightly different (Matthew 6:9-13). Jesus doesn’t say this is the only prayer we should pray, but the Lord’s Prayer does teach us about prayer in general.

We are to begin prayer, says Jesus, by noticing that God is like a loving parent and we, each of us, all of us, are part of God’s family (“Our Father”). Yet God is also a Holy Mystery that can’t be limited to one image and is deserving of our reverence (“hallowed be thy name”).

Then, we are to orient ourselves to what God wills for God’s Creation, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” But just what is God’s will? That question is worth an entire sermon series, but for now, I’ll note that Jesus doesn’t confuse God’s will with fate or destiny. Rather, when Jesus says, “thy will,” he means God’s desires for God’s world. He describes this with the metaphor, “the kingdom of God;” thus, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth …” The simplest way for Christians to determine what “God’s will” means is to look at Jesus himself. If we do this, we’ll see in Jesus’ life and teachings that God’s will is that we love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love our neighbors as ourselves. We’ll see that we are to welcome outcasts, forgive others and accept forgiveness, and be reconciled with our enemies. We’ll see that we are to help those in need regardless of who they are, and that all manner of healing is more important than almost anything else we can do. When we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth,” we pray that we will adjust, adapt, and transform our lives, desires, and hopes to these desires of God for all of God’s world.

Next, Jesus teaches that we are to bring our needs to God: our need for survival and sustenance (our “daily bread”), and our need for forgiveness and reconciliation (“forgive us …, as we forgive others …”). On the one hand, every pronoun is in the plural – our daily bread, not my daily bread. We are praying for the welfare of all. On the other hand, being open and honest with God about our personal, individual fears, needs, and vulnerabilities helps us recognize them and put them in the context of God’s love. Praying is how we form and maintain a relationship with God, and honest communication is always better for relationships.

Finally, we are to remember that, in many ways, the world in which we live does not reflect God’s will, and we pray to be spared those temptations, those “trials,” that might throw us off track.

Jesus follows his model prayer with some especially challenging verses: “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” Does Jesus really mean we’ll get whatever we pray for as though God were a giant vending machine in the sky? No. Careful reading shows that Jesus makes only one promise: When we pray, God will give us God’s Spirit.

But what does that mean? When what you really want is for your loved one to survive cancer or for your child to stay off drugs or for people to be treated justly or for the bombs to stop falling, God’s Spirit may not sound like enough of an answer to prayer. I know many people who pray and wonder, “Is anybody listening?”

Søren Kierkegaard said, “The function of prayer is not to influence God but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” That is certainly my own experience. Debie Thomas writes, “…[O]ften … I want God to sweep in and fix everything much more than I want God’s Spirit to fill and accompany me so that I can do my part to heal the world. Resting in God’s yes [to give us the Spirit] requires vulnerability, patience, courage, discipline, and trust — traits I can only cultivate in prayer.”

God’s Spirit is the source of those traits. God’s Spirit is exactly what we need to participate with God in healing the world. Perhaps the precise way prayer changes us is as individual as each one of us, as complex as our complex lives, but the goal is always healing: healing ourselves, healing God’s world.

The old hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” includes these lines:
Have we trials and temptations?
Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged,
Take it to the Lord in prayer.

I won’t tell anyone that they should never be discouraged. However, I agree with the hymn that we should bring everything to God in prayer. Everything. Not because God will fix everything, but because it means we’re showing up. We’re maintaining the relationship. Nothing we bring to God will surprise God. I realize prayer is in many ways mysterious; how it “works” or changes us is hard to measure or prove but Jesus said “when.” “When you pray…” Not “if.” So we pray, with and without words, on our knees and in real and metaphorical bunkers, in desperation and in gratitude, and we count on the promise that God’s Spirit will change us, heal us, and change and heal the world through us.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Debie Thomas, “When You Pray,” in Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories: Reflections on the Life of Christ (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022).
Brian D. McLaren, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbl6hPBA5rU.

Suggestions for Getting Through Election Day

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I’m normally not anxious; it’s just not my natural state of being.  But today, I am anxious.  The stakes are high.  In 2016, it was inconceivable that Donald Trump could be elected as the President of the United States.  I can’t help but think of Vizzini, the character played by Wallace Shawn in “The Princess Bride.”  But like Vizzini, I learned that what I’d thought was inconceivable could happen, and it actually did.  It is no longer inconceivable. 

How do we get through the day, when, as the Washington Post puts it, “Whoever wins, half of voters will be surprised”?  I’m not staying plugged into nonstop news; I’m not checking social media too often.  My husband asked me if I’d watch the returns on TV tonight.  I said I can’t not watch the returns. 

But until then, I’m doing a handful of things to stay sane, and maybe these suggestions will help you, as well.

I’m walking, with and without my dog.  Walking is a spiritual discipline for me, a way of praying.  Solvitur ambulando. 

I’ve been praying an excellent Prayer for Peace and Justice on Election Day by Teri McDowell Ott, published in the Presbyterian Outlook: https://pres-outlook.org/2024/11/a-prayer-for-peace-and-justice-on-election-day/  This prayer lifts up poll workers and election workers, about whom I have particular concern today.

I’m not on TikTok, but I’m grateful that a pastor colleague shared an extremely hopeful TikTok by author Brian D. McLaren in which he simply and compassionately describes the cultural forces that have brought us to this place in history.  As he says, “Something is trying to be born, and something is dying.” https://www.tiktok.com/@brianmclaren/video/7432884450091961642  If you don’t know about Brian D. McLaren, I can’t recommend his books enough.  Check out Faith after Doubt, Do I Stay Christian? And The Great Spiritual Migration.

That same pastor colleague shared a video by a man named Neal Foard, entitled “A Postcard from 1969.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaMkOES-y3Y.  It turns out Foard has a YouTube channel chock full of encouraging stories about small kindnesses that speak powerfully of the goodness of people.  I subscribed!  Neal Foard will be a regular resource for me going forward.  https://www.youtube.com/user/nealfoard/videos

For lunch today, my husband and I sought out a Mexican restaurant not far from our house.  Like many restaurants in my city of Richmond, California, the people who work there clearly don’t speak English very often.  It felt like the right place to be.  Maybe your town has a similar restaurant where they speak mostly Spanish, or Vietnamese, or Chinese, or Farsi, or …. ?

I wrote and posted a blog that lifts up the values we should be taking into the voting booth if we claim to be followers of Jesus.  https://solve-by-walking.com/2024/11/05/really-seeing-each-other/  

I will probably make an Election Day playlist before the day is over.  It will include, among other songs, “Yes We Can Can” by the Pointer Sisters, “Stand” by Sly and the Family Stone, “Put a Woman in Charge” by Keb Mo, and “Respect” by Aretha Franklin.  Your ideas and suggestions are welcome.

How are you staying sane?

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved. 

Out of the Depths

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Psalm 130

   Once you reach a certain age, you realize that into everyone’s life come times of crisis, times when it seems the bottom has fallen out.  Psalm 130 begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”  We don’t know what happened to the psalmist.  Tradition says this prayer reflects King David’s anguish at the death of his son Absalom.  Absalom led an insurrection against his father, which must have been horrible enough.  David sent word to his army to spare the life of his son, but in spite of that, Absalom’s life came to a violent end.

   I’m glad the psalmist isn’t specific about Absalom or anything else because that way we can insert our own experience of what has caused the bottom to fall out.  When I served a congregation, I could look out at the folks in the pews on a Sunday morning and know that many people’s lives were going very well, at least that morning.  But sitting two pews up from these happy worshipers, or right behind them, or maybe even right next to them, chances are there was someone who was either in the midst of a crisis or whose memory of a crisis was very fresh.  Someone who had been out of work for months.  Someone dealing with dementia.  Someone who had just received a frightening diagnosis.  Someone whose child wouldn’t call them, or whose marriage had grown cold. 

   For many people in crisis, God seems not only distant but absent; it can feel as though God has abandoned you.  Notice that in Psalm 130, the psalmist assumes that Someone is already there to hear the cry.  “Let your ears, O God, be attentive to my need.”  The simple, unadorned cry for God to hear and to help is a prayer, and any prayer puts us squarely in front of God and opens our hearts to what God can do in us and through us.  Our prayers don’t need to be pretty or full of churchy words.  Joanna Adams writes, “If you ever find yourself in a valley so dark it makes the bottom of the well look like sunshine, remember this.  You do not have to outline the situation with appropriate sentence structure for the Almighty.  You do not have to compose perfect paragraphs.  You just have to know your need and know that God knows your need before you even put words to it.  God’s love is steadfast.  God’s love is plenteous enough for any terrible situation.  A cry in the dark suffices.”    

   Note also that the psalmist doesn’t blame God for whatever happened.  On a rainy night in 1983, William Sloane Coffin’s son Alex died in a car accident. Coffin, a minister and civil rights activist, was at his sister’s house the next day when one of her friends came by to offer comfort and a stack of quiches.  When the woman saw Coffin, she shook her head and said, “I just don’t understand the will of God when something like this happens.”  Coffin says instantly he was up and in hot pursuit.  “I’ll say you don’t, lady!”  He knew the anger would do him good, so he continued: “Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his?  Do you think it was the will of God that Alex was driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of [beers] too many?  Do you think it is God’s will that there [is] … no guard rail separating the road and Boston Harbor?  My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves in Boston harbor closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” 

   Out of the depths we cry to God and discover that God is there ahead of us.

   In verse 3, the psalmist refers to his wrongdoings, his “iniquities.”  It’s very common for people in the depths to wonder, “Why is this happening to me?  Is God punishing me?”  Certainly actions can have consequences and bad actions can have bad consequences.  But the psalmist is correcting a wrong belief that God is a God of retribution.  He is denying the image of an angry God pacing back and forth up in heaven with a rolled up newspaper just ready to swat someone.  The psalmist tells us that he knows he has sinned but so has everyone else, and he knows that’s not why he’s stuck in the depths.  If that were the case, there would be no hope for anyone; the depths would be the only possibility.  But that is not God’s way, says the psalmist.  Forgiveness is the way of the Lord.  God’s way is reconciliation, not punishment. 

   The psalmist’s prescription is waiting and hoping, which is very, very hard when physical, emotional, or spiritual pain is severe.  That’s where the rest of us come in, those of us who are not in crisis, who are not in the depths – for now.  When church folks said to me, “I don’t have any hope left,” that’s when I’d say, “Then you’ll have to let those of us who love you hope for you.  You are carrying enough.  We will carry the hope for now.”

   Anne Lamott wrote in Traveling Mercies, “Our preacher … said recently that this is life’s nature: that lives and hearts get broken – those of people we love, those of people we’ll never meet.  She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes.  You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and crackers.”

   That, my friends, is what church should be. 

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

A Prayer for Those Sent

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John 17:6-19

   I’m not a big fan of the Farewell Discourse, the long pep talk that Jesus gives the disciples in John’s Gospel the night before his arrest.  John’s Jesus is mystical and prescient; I much prefer Mark’s down to earth Jesus.  The Farewell Discourse showcases this mystical Jesus, and besides that, it repeats many variations of “I’m in God, and God is in me, and I’m in you, and you’re in me, and God is in you …” to which one of my fellow seminarians responded under his breath, “Goo goo a’joob.”  If you don’t get the reference, go ask a baby boomer.

   John 17:6-19 is the prayer that follows the Farewell Discourse.  The repetition continues with Jesus using the word “world” over and over.  The Greek word is κόσμος, or cosmos, which we probably think of as the universe, but in Greek it implies a system, an order, and especially in John’s gospel, the human system that creates alienation from God.  The cosmos is the social construction of reality that divides people, that creates systems of who is in and who is out, who is at the top of the heap and who is at the bottom.  This is the system that would oppose a reality with God’s love at the center.  In John 3:16, we’re told it’s this very cosmos that God loves; it’s this cosmos that God intends to save.

   Some read this passage and conclude that because the disciples “do not belong to the world, just as I [Jesus] do not belong to the world” (vs. 14), Christians should turn their backs on the world.  Some Christians separate themselves from the secular world; they won’t vote, take up arms, take oaths, or hold public office.  But Jesus is sending his disciples into the world, into the cosmos, into the social construction of reality: “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”  As a Presbyterian, part of the Reformed tradition, I have inherited a long-held belief in living our faith in the world: whatever concerns humanity and its welfare is the concern of Christians.  There is nothing that is not God’s business.

   Jesus sends his disciples into the cosmos, into the social construction of reality, in order to transform it.  Thus, the Reformed Tradition has a long history of political activism aimed at helping God transform the world to look more like God’s Kingdom; going upstream, as it were, to address discrimination, poverty, disease, war; advocating for the marginalized and oppressed.  Presbyterians have a big fat book of social witness policies adopted by our General Assembly on everything from gun violence to racism to abortion to capital punishment to LGBTQ+ rights.

   A brief cul-de-saq: In any discussion of churches and activism, someone inevitably wonders about the “separation of church and state.”  The First Amendment to the Constitution restricts governments, not churches.  It says Congress can’t establish a religion; it can’t make any religion the official religion the way the Anglican Church is the Church of England.  The courts have interpreted this to mean the government can’t do anything to promote any particular religion or religion in general.  So you can’t require prayer in public schools, or put a nativity scene on public property.  The First Amendment also says Congress can’t get in the way of religious practices.  The government can’t require Jews to work on Saturdays or Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag, and it can’t stop any student in any school, public or private, from praying before an exam.  Essentially, the government can step in only if a religious practice is dangerous to health or safety. 

   This point is crucial in our current political climate: The First Amendment allows churches to advocate for political change, but not to replace the secular government with a faith-based one.  My Presbyterian ancestors fought for this.  Simply put, if someone says, “I can’t do that.  It’s against my religion,” that’s perfectly fine.  That’s religious freedom.  But if someone tries to say, “You can’t do that.  It’s against my religion,” the First Amendment should put a stop to it. 

    But back to the Farewell Discourse.  Like Jesus, all good leaders, teachers, pastors, mentors, and parents know that you do your best to prepare folks and then you send them out into the world.  You pray you’ve done enough to get them ready for what they’ll face, and you pray that what they’ll face won’t hurt or destroy them.  In this season of graduations, Jesus’ prayer is particularly poignant. 

   At the end of the War of Independence, General George Washington had fulfilled his duties as Commander-in-Chief of the army. He sent his own farewell letter to the governors of the thirteen states, closing with a prayer that echoes Jesus’ prayer for his disciples and all our prayers for those whom we send:

    “Almighty God; We make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep the United States in Thy Holy protection; and Thou wilt incline the hearts of the Citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to Government; and entertain an affection and love for one another and for all Citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for those who have served in the Field.  And finally that Thou wilt most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility, and pacific tempter of mind which were the Characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without a humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation.  Grant our supplication, we beseech Thee, in the Name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

   We are sent into the world.  And Jesus continues to pray for us.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved. 

Contemplative Activism

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Mark 1:29-39

We’re told “the whole city was gathered” around Jesus’ door because he’s been healing the sick. Yet, in the morning, when it was still dark, he went to a deserted place to pray.

With so many social and global ills bearing down on us – war in several parts of the globe, climate change, gun violence, white supremacy, political polarization, homelessness, a growing disparity between rich and poor, just to name a few – you might think, “Who has time to pray? We need to act!” But as someone put it, the answer to the question, “Should I be an activist or a contemplative?” is “Yes!” With his early morning prayer in solitude, Jesus is our role model for “contemplative activism.”

Here’s the scenario: You’re passionate about a cause. Or many causes. You want to change the world, and the world sorely needs to be changed. Wrongs need to be righted; systems, structures, and individuals need to be confronted. Our righteous anger or moral outrage are motivating, but they are not effective as strategies. Further, they just aren’t sustainable. We lose hope, become exhausted, get burned out. Or we cause as many problems as we solve.

Thomas Merton wrote, “He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action.”

Someone else put it this way: “We will respond to trauma either by praying for God to punish those who hurt us, or by praying, ‘Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.’” In order to be able to pray the latter, we need an approach to promoting social change that channels our best, loving selves, instead of our angry, resentful selves, an approach that allows for both self-examination and self-care. The term for that approach is “contemplative action.”

The guru of contemplative action is Father Richard Rohr, who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987 “…because,” he writes, “I saw a deep need for the integration of both action and contemplation. Over the years I met many social activists who were doing excellent social analysis and advocating for crucial justice issues, but they were not working from an energy of love except in their own minds. They were still living out of their false self with the need to win, the need to look good, the attachment to a superior, politically correct self-image.”

Rohr continues, “They might have the answer, but they are not themselves the answer. In fact, they are often part of the problem. … Too many reformers self-destruct from within. For that very reason, I believe, Jesus and great spiritual teachers first emphasize transformation of consciousness and soul. Unless that happens, there is no lasting or grounded reform or revolution. When a subjugated people rise to power, they often become as controlling and dominating as their oppressors because the same demon of power has never been exorcised in them. We need less reformation and more transformation.”

Jesus shows us what we must do. Even with the whole town clamoring at his door, with more work to be done, when it was still dark, he went to a deserted place to pray. He reconnected with God, and likely with himself. There are many ways to pray that are considered contemplative, but they always have a foundation of silence, stillness, and solitude. For some, this means a commitment to practices like centering prayer, the Daily Examen, or meditation. Others choose physical practices like yoga, breathing exercises, or dancing.

Activist, or a contemplative? Yes!

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.